Review: Täydellinen lauantai
Wife, mistress, punk boy, Polish plumber and best friend as Santa Claus in the cabbage patch – French Floria Zeller’s comedy draws its fun from traditional attitudes
Comedy is called the king of theatre for a reason. That’s how demanding it is to do something fun in front of a live audience.
This demanding nature of making comedy is also reminded by Jaakko Saariluoma, the director of Perfect Saturday.
Apparently, the scripts need to be printed in theatres at a time when the production is at its most intense and the mental strain of creative work for the director is at its peak.
But at least Saariluoma doesn’t have to apologize to us viewers for himself and his ensemble. Florian Zeller’s comedy, performed by the Helsinki City Theatre on Thursday, was smooth and fun.
Une heure de tranquillté, published in 2013 by the Frenchman Florian Zeller , has been a big hit in the author’s home country. Or at least there are a large number of video recordings online that French-language theatres have used to market their plays. A film has also been made based on Zeller’s script.
French theatres have marketed Zeller’s play as a farce. It even has elements of a traditional door farce. However, the slow tempo of the play is not a typical farce way. Personally, I could imagine that at least the Helsinki City Theatre’s Perfect Saturday is a folk comedy set in an urban environment.
However, such definitions are not important.
According to the Drama Corner’s website, Reita Lounatvuori translated Zeller’s play into Finnish in 2014. Lounatvuori, who uses the Finnish language masterfully, has also succeeded in summing up the play’s central content in two words through irony.
Pekka Strang makes his voice hoarse in the central role of Markus in the comedy. The play’s Markus is a middle-aged and middle-class gentleman whose three key life guidelines for life management are me, me and me.
Markus in the play also has a great hobby. He collects rare vinyl records and the events of Perfect Saturday start rolling in when he finds Neil Youart’s album “me, myself and I” at a flea market and wants to calm down his apartment for an hour to listen to this rare jazz masterpiece.
Zeller uses a lot of repetition at the beginning of the play. I assume that the humour at the beginning of the play lies, at least in part, in the somewhat complex relationship between the French and the English language. Of course, this does not necessarily open up to us Finnish viewers, but the beginning of the performance felt a bit dragging.
From then on, the pace picked up, and there were surprising twists and turns in the increasingly fast prankster, as should be the case in a properly constructed comedy.
The language of the Lounatvuori translation often worked in an enjoyable way. For example, Polish plumber is a pair of words with a very wide range of meanings. Even the hard core of the British Brexit mess can be summed up in the concept of the Polish plumber.
The dilemma that Saariluoma refers to in the director’s comment is the timing of the scenes. The Finnish language has its own rhythm and Zeller’s Perfect Saturday is a very talkative play. This time, the play’s relatively slow rhythm and very long developments fit well into the Finnish language. Although the blows resulting from the surprising twists and turns were predictable, they hit the nerve of laughter.
Zeller has written his comedy in such a way that it is kind of a one-man show. No wonder, then, that Strang’s voice, who led the role, seemed to become hoarse during the performance.
According to the script, Zeller’s play is inspired by Simon Gray’s play Otherwise Engaged. This comedy by the English playwright premiered in 1975.
However, the plot of the story is certainly familiar to most theater enthusiasts from many other comedies. The twists and turns of relationships are twisted from a man’s point of view. In that sense, Perfect Saturday in 2019 is a bit old-fashioned. But on the other hand, a certain kind of conservatism is a basic characteristic of comedies.
The comedy was at its funniest when Vuokko Huovatta, who played Markus’s wife, and Vappu Nalbantanglu , who played Markus’ mistress, were on stage and Strang’s monologue turned into dialogue.
Last winter, Saariluoma directed a Swedish-language version of Zeller’s play, Ens lite lungn i huset. As I understand it, the premiere of Lilla Teatern, which operates in connection with the Helsinki City Theatre, in February was the premiere of Zeller’s play in Finland.
Working in Swedish has certainly been an enlightening experience for Saariluoma and laid the groundwork for Thursday’s success.
Swedish-language theatre is of much greater importance to Finnish theatre than its size. Strang, who has excelled in the lead role of a perfect Saturday, has worked as the director of Lila Teatern, among other things.
Sixten Lundberg played the role of Pavel in the play already in Lilla Teatern’s version and now the same role in Finnish.